Conventionally, in a marketplace (e.g. convenience store, chain supermarket, department store, variety store, shopping mall, etc.), a checkout is realized at a checkout counter through the manual input of an amount or by inputting the commodities purchased through an infrared code scanning.
The way the infrared code scanning reduces the expenses of the marketplace as well as provides convenient service for the customer to save checkout time for the customer. However, this technology, as is required to scan objects one by one, is still time-consuming.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), one of the mainstream technologies used in recent years, consists mainly of a RFID tag (also called radio frequency identification tag) and a reader. The RFID tag may be placed on each object and contains specific information of the object such as price, identifier, expiration date and serial number. By placing an RFID tag on each object, a batch or cart of objects can be wholly scanned one time, which shortens the time spent on object reading when compared with the scanning on each object one by one.
As stated above, RFID technology can read, through wireless communication, multiple objects automatically in a non-contact manner, without the aid of any manpower, thus quickening the checkout speed of a marketplace significantly. In application, an RFID tag may be set on a commodity, and a reader may be mounted on a shopping cart so that the commodity in the shopping cart and the total price of the commodities can be read by the reader, or an RFID gate system is configured in a marketplace to read a shopping cart immediately the shopping cart passes the RFID gate system.